Why the hardest seasons of life are often where God does His deepest work
Even if you’re living a life that wasn’t your choice, it’s possible to feel as though you’re at fault.
You can be doing everything you’re supposed to do; showing up, caring for people, holding things together… and still carry the sense that something inside you no longer fits.
Sometimes life changes because you choose to. Sometimes it changes because life chose for you.
- A diagnosis.
- A betrayal.
- A marriage ending.
- Children leaving home.
- A role shifting.
- A grief you didn’t ask for.
- A faith unraveling.
And suddenly, you find yourself standing somewhere between who you were and who you are becoming.
Not fully there.
Not fully here.
The Bible understands this space better than we often realize.
Hagar lived there.
In Genesis 16, after fleeing from Sarai, Hagar encounters God in the wilderness. She names the place, at a spring, Beer-lahai-roi—“the well of the Living One who sees me.”
Then Scripture adds: “It is between Kadesh and Bered.” At first glance, it feels like a throwaway geographical detail. It isn’t.
Beer-lahai-roi sits between two places—on the threshold of one place and another. That becomes a metaphor for Hagar’s entire story. She is no longer where she was, but she is not yet where she is going. She has one foot in her old life and one foot in a future she couldn’t have imagined.
She is standing in a liminal space: the threshold between rooms, the pause between chapters, the season where old identities no longer fit, but the new ones have not fully formed.
Most of us rush this space. We want answers, resolution, and movement. We want out. But Scripture slows us down here.
Kadesh—the place named in this passage—later becomes deeply associated with threshold moments. It sits near the border of the Promised Land, a place of decision, where Israel would stand on the edge of promise and have to choose whether they trusted God enough to move forward.
When we hear the word wilderness, many of us imagine trees, mountain trails, and quiet forests.
This was not that. This was heat, exposure, dryness, and survival.
No control.
No easy way forward.
Her physical location mirrors her social one—on the margins of Abram’s household and society, neither fully inside nor fully outside.
And yet, it is often in these liminal spaces where change and encounter become most possible because liminal space has a way of loosening identities that no longer fit. It strips away the labels we built survival around. It forces the deeper questions:
Who am I now?
Who am I without this role?
Who am I if this life looks different from what I planned?
These are wilderness questions. And they are holy ones.
God does not wait for arrival to meet people. He meets them in transition.
Not after the healing.
Not after the breakthrough.
Not after the five-step plan.
There — in the wilderness, in the in-between — is where Hagar meets El Roi, the God who sees.
It is also where Hagar begins to truly see God.
That is where relationship begins.
That is where many of us meet Him, too. Sometimes the holiest work happens in the in-between.
It is the place where you are seen, and perhaps for the first time, you begin to see clearly.
In the wilderness, you leave what was and step into what will be. That is exactly where God does His deepest work.